now I guess it will be fun trying to find newish bits for it (it did come with the dock that gives me a vga, com, and parallel port!) also, would an SSD run under window 95 or dos?

No.

I'm not even sure if Windows 95 supports UDMA, but it most certainly doesn't support AHCI. You might be stuck with drives running in pure IDE mode. While it might run, you'll very quickly screw the drive up.

Also, it depends on what version of Windows 95. Win95C supports FAT32 properly, but A and B (SR1, OSR2 etc) only support FAT, and don't even support exFAT. You're therefore stuck with a 4GB (from memory) limit and small pages.

FreeDOS and 4DOS might give you more luck than MSDOS with IDE drivers, but MS-DOS 6.22 isn't going to give you a lot of love on an older motherboard that doesn't have native emulation support.
Remember that Windows 95 doesn't even have USB support.